JHU Press Blog

Today, artificial hearts are a clinical reality in the form of total artificial hearts and ventricular assist devices (or partial artificial hearts). These are life-sustaining devices that do a remarkable thing: they alter the usual course of events that when a person’s heart failed, that person died.

Artificial heart devices work to increase blood flow and to sustain life for end-stage heart failure patients. These devices may completely replace or assist the diseased native heart. They may be implanted or reside outside the body, for temporary or permanent mechanical circulatory support. Different heart failure patients require different cardiac devices, depending on their needs.

Artificial heart prototypes, circa late 1950s to 1970s, developed in Dr Willem Kolff's research program. Courtesy of Special Collections, J. Williard Marriott...Read More

Colleges face pressures from all sides to improve their performance in a wide range of areas. The federal government highlights student outcomes for low-performing colleges and threatens to strip student financial aid eligibility from the worst institutions, while many state governments now tie a portion of appropriations to outcomes such as the number of students who graduate. Accrediting agencies are pushing for more resources to be devoted to particular programs, while faculty and student governments often have different priorities of their own. College rankings providers and media outlets try to shape colleges’ actions to match their own preferences, which could be focused on prestige, social mobility, or ensuring free speech on campus.

The web of accountability pressures can be difficult for colleges to manage, since many of these pressures can be pulling them in different directions. For example, college rankings systems that reward universities for being as selective and prestigious as possible conflict with state performance-based funding systems that pay colleges for each student who graduates. Colleges then have to prioritize which pressure is more important to them and respond accordingly—or try to find a way to game the metric in a way that lets them have their cake...Read More

Books have a way of influencing your life more so even than experiences. They seem to connect directly to your subconscious, change it, and can alter your path. So while I have been enamored with creeping and crawling things ever since I first began catching toads, lizards, and harmless snakes, I’m not sure I would have mounted those backyard expeditions if my grandmother hadn’t given me my first dinosaur book. That book began my childhood obsession with dinosaurs, which soon transferred to amphibians and reptiles when l realized they can actually be found alive. Likewise, my interest in snakes was strong but may never have flowered into a career had it not been for my mother’s gift of Roger Conant’s Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians. I accompanied my mom to Maggie Valley, North Carolina, where, after seeing a snake demonstration at the local zoo, I was allowed to heft an adult boa constrictor on my shoulders. At a local bookstore, I spotted the field guide. My mother told me it was too expensive, and doubtless it was; during those days she was often the sole bread winner for four growing children. Yet when we got back to our...Read More

The 2017 volume of the journal Poe Studies marked the 50th publication of the journal dedicated to the author near and dear to our hometown of Baltimore. The annual issue included a cluster of papers on "Poe and Nineteenth-Century Medicine." Washington State University's Jana Argersinger, who edits the journal along with the University of Cincinnati's Leland Person, joined us for a Q&A about the milestone and the journal's place in the field of literary studies.

What does it mean to be in charge of the journal at such a milestone?

In one way, it’s bittersweet—recognizing that the first scholarly journal centered on Edgar Allan Poe has had a longer run than the author himself, whose life spanned only forty years (from 1809 to 1849). While in a sense such milestones, like the century marks of prominent writers’ births, are arbitrary, just round numbers, they give us convenient occasions to take stock. (The Poe Studies Association feted Poe’s bicentennial in 2009 with an international conference in Philadelphia.) In the case of Poe Studies , the progression of five decades says something about both the vitality of the journal and the enduring power of the writer.

A team at Oregon State University took over the editorial duties for the journal Feminist Formations in 2016. Editor Patti Duncan took some time to talk with us about the journal and its innovative work in women's, gender and sexuality studies when she visted Baltimore for the National Women's Studies Association Conference in late 2017.

In her final issue as editor of Theatre Journal , Joanne Tompkins put together a special issue on theatre, performance and visual images . The essays in the issue engage in images in theatre and the image of theater, she writes in her introduction to the special issue. Tompkins, a professor in the School of Communication and the Arts at the University of Queensland, Australia, joined us for a Q&A about the issue and her tenure as editor of the journal.

In your introduction, you mention that visual culture and visual images have been the focus of previous journal issues. What brought about the development of this recent issue on the topic?

I came into the position of co-editor, and subsequently editor, with a range of ideas for special issues. Some of them have come into being, but inevitably, some ideas that initially seemed exciting don’t work out. That is, there’s some distance between an idea and how that idea gets ‘translated’ into what we hope is an appealing call for papers. The topic that I was planning for my final special issue failed to translate cogently...Read More

WHERE DID ARTHUR MILLER GET THE IDEA FOR THE SEXUAL THEME IN THE CRUCIBLE ?

In doing the research for my book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt , I came across a surprising realization. Not only did Arthur Miller take nearly the whole story of the Salem witch hunt for his famous play, The Crucible (1953), from his having read Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), but he very likely drew the play’s central dramatic tension, concerning a former affair between the accuser, Abigail Williams, and the accused protagonist, John Procter, from Starkey’s history as well.

Two famous literary archives, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, are currently jousting over custody of Arthur Miller’s voluminous private papers, including 160 boxes of materials and another 8,000 pages of private journals (see Jennifer Schuessler’s article, “Fight for Arthur Miller’s Archive,” New York Times , January 10, 2018). When scholars gain access to these documents, longstanding mysteries concerning the central plot line of The Crucible may finally be...Read More

In March 2017, eight scholars from a variety of disciplines gathered at Texas A&M University for a two-day conference called "1917: A Global Turning Point in History and Memory." The discussions and presentations were later developed into a special issue of the journal South Central Review . Adam R. Seipp, a Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M and guest editor of the issue, joined us to talk about the project and the important historical and cultural lessons we can learn from 100 years ago.

Reports about the increasing turnover of college and university presidents are in the news. The reasons for turnover range from a lack of clarity of expectations, problematic responses to student and faculty protests, political interference, and more. In light of these and other serious concerns, boards and presidents can benefit from a guidebook for selecting members and orienting them to their duties.

In How University Boards Work , I give examples of positive and negative board behavior; guidance on board professional development and how boards should fulfill their duties of care, loyalty and obedience; information on how best to prepare for board decisions and discussions; and advice on leadership development, succession planning, and managing the transition between chief executives, among other topics.

Just as corporate boards require members who know the industry, science, and technology at the core of the company’s business, so too universities benefit from trustees who can contribute substantively to planning and decision-making, not just annual or capital gifts. University trustees are most effective when they know the history, the mission and purpose, the students to be served and the competitive landscape, and the comparative advantages of the institutions they serve. As...Read More

ASAP/Journal took home an award for the second straight year by winning the Best New Journal award after its second year of publication. The journal won Best Design from CELJ in January 2017.

The scholarly publication of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, ASAP/Journal explores new developments in post-1960s visual, media, literary, and performance arts.

“We are incredibly honored to receive another award from CELJ," said Jonathan Eburne , who co-edited the journal's first two volumes with Amy Elias from the University of Tennessee. "We believe in promoting intellectual exchanges and appreciate the recognition for our work."

Eburne, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Penn State University, will serve as Editor in Chief beginning with Volume 3 in 2018.